Contracts — Lanham Act

Listen to this article

Contracts — Lanham Act

Advertising need not be directed to the general public to be subject to the Lanham Act.

“The district court was troubled by the fact that ‘there is no evidence that the statements at issue were presented to any members of the general public.’ Well of course not; members of the general public do not buy high-speed turbo blowers or advise waste water treatment plants on the purchase of such blowers. There is no basis for limiting the Lanham Act to advertising or promotion directed to the general public, and the case law does not do that. See, e.g., LidoChem, Inc. v. Stoller Enterprises, Inc., supra, 2012 WL 4009709, at *8 (applying the Act to letters sent and statements made to distributors of farm chemicals); Porous Media Corp. v. Pall Corp., supra, 173 F.3d at 1114 (applying the Act to an ‘alert’ sent only to large makers of air filters and to resellers of the filters); Coastal Abstract Service, Inc. v. First American Title Ins. Co., supra, 173 F.3d at 735 (to statements made only to one of two or three national refinancing companies); Seven-Up Co. v. Coca-Cola Co., supra, 86 F.3d at 1381 (only to independent soft drink bottlers). What advertising is not directed to subsets of the public (dog owners in our previous example) rather than to 314 million individuals and millions of firms? One of the subsets is engineering firms, and others are subsets of engineering firms such as the civil engineering firms that were faxed advertisements in CE Design Ltd. v. King Architectural Metals, Inc., 637 F.3d 721 (7th Cir. 2011).

No one doubted that those advertisements (challenged under a different statute) were—advertising.”

Affirmed in part, and Reversed in part.

11-2260 & 11-2375 Neuros Co., Ltd., v. KTurbo, Inc.

Appeals from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Darrah, J., Posner, J.

Full Text